Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker in the first Star Wars film. Photograph: Lucasfilm/Allstar

John Williams' Star Wars theme has been named as the winner of a BBC poll to find the UK's favourite film score.

The music won more than a quarter of the votes, beating Ennio Morricone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly to the top spot in a project organised as part of a season of TV and radio programmes celebrating the 'Sound of Cinema'.

Next was Leonard Bernstein's West Side Story, followed by Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia and Anton Karas's The Third Man.

More recent films get a look in too, with Hans Zimmer's Dark Knight Rises at number seven and the theme for Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained at number 12.

The top 20 will be performed live by the BBC Concert Orchestra on Radio 3 on Friday from 2pm. The shortlist was drawn up by a panel that included presenters from different BBC radio stations.

• This article was amended on 30 September 2013. An earlier version said that Bernard Herrmann, rather than Anton Karas, wrote the score for The Third Man.

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